AOC Director Gill Lambert tells ColourDesign Library how colour is shaping ‘the most joyful museum in the world’. 

Colour and creativity

“Great museums are as much about curating the future as preserving the past,” V&A Director Tristram Hunt has said of Young V&A – the project radically reimaging a 19th century museum into a creativity kickstarter for children.

We caught up with Gill Lambert of architects AOC (Agents of Change) to find out how colour is informing the design of exhibition space at what will be the UK’s first national museum dedicated to creativity and young people, set to launch in summer 2023.

“Agents of Change believes that the participation of others in the design process makes for better buildings and spaces,” says Lambert, describing how her practice won the project in an international competition in 2018. ”The brief was to design the most joyful museum experience in the world. Over the past four years we’ve worked with different audiences and teams at the museum to create new visitor experiences through co-design, co-curation and co-production.”

Envisaging with colour

A first move by AOC was to take over the existing museum with Open Studio, a collaborative space for generating and testing ideas through large-scale models, samples and prototypes. “Essentially we asked primary school children, teenagers, families, carers and teachers to explore what a joyful museum would mean to them,“ explains Lambert.

“Colour was a big factor in a lot of people’s visions, so it’s been key to our design approach,” says Lambert. A series of ‘Riot of Colour’ workshops with materials specialists Franklin Till invited local schoolchildren to create colourful sculptures from found materials. These led to colour palettes, with children mixing colours and creating their own combinations. “Pink and yellow was a recurrent theme. We agreed it would bring ultimate joy because in contemporary thinking yellow is widely considered the most joyful colour but in Elizabethan times it was pink”.

Play, Imagine and Design

The project creates three new galleries for children from 0–14. Each opens up to the museum’s historic vaulted hall, reimagined as a town-square indoor space complete with giant public bench along its perimeter.

Working with graphic designers Graphic Thought Facility, AOC conceived ‘amaze letters’ spelling out in colour the museum’s three new zones – Play, Imagine and Design. The giant letters, says Lambert, are not so much about wayfinding as about creating a wow factor ­– sparking a sense of creative energy and choice.

“The galleries are subdivided for different ages and interests, and across the project we’ve used colour in diverse ways,” explains Lambert.  Imagine, for instance, is a series of room sets building on emotional responses to curatorial themes – its theatre and performance area, The Stage, is a warmly glowing red cocoon of space. Meanwhile visitors arriving at Living Together with its blue ceiling and urban-grain carpet will suddenly feel they’re outside and Adventure will feel like being at sea.

The Play gallery is a more open landscape organised by age. Children will be able to grow up here, says Lambert, starting with a ‘pre-walkers’ area. The focus is on a layering of colour, texture, form and sound – promoting sensory experiences of colour, for instance, by grouping the collection’s objects in colour totems alongside hands-on interaction and developing motor skills. In contrast the Design gallery, slanted towards older audiences, uses a palette of more natural tones like the deep-reddish brown of hemp cladding and contrasting timbers: “Colour is much more of nature here, talking of a built-in materiality as part of the gallery’s narrative,” says Lambert.

Colour futures

“Colour wasn’t really on the agenda when we were studying architecture but we think it really should be,” declares Lambert. “All the AOC directors teach now, and it’s definitely something we talk about with our students. I would say that as a practice our approach to colour is very much experience-led rather than about making gestures or aesthetic statements.”